Publisher Description
Post-Cold War, the world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong. Kagan poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.
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“Since reading this book China hosted the Olympics in all its pomp and circumstance and Russia reasserted its dominance over its near abroad. These events fall accurately into the world view that Kagan puts forth in his neo-con essay. Interestingly his assumption of authoritarian unity vs. the “democratic” west is quite obviously false. Chinese-American interdependence is one of the greatest symbiotic relationships in the world. Furthermore, competing interests in Central and South Asia will increasingly put China at odds with the Russian oligarchs. To assume, because they follow the same development and government patterns that they are natural allies, is ridiculous. The reality is that as America draws down its international presence in the medium term the vacuum will be filled with the new Great Powers competing against one another just like the old days.”
—
Stewart (4 out of 5 stars)
